If youÂ’re going to kill a tree for Christmas then I think it is at least polite to dispose of it properly when the Yuletide season is over. IÂ’m not saying you need to organise a special funeral for it, or anything, but itÂ’s not all that tricky to mulch it up, or have a bonfire or take it to the dump.
ItÂ’s best not to do what the people at the end of my road have done, which is just dump it on the pavement and hope it goes away on its own, like some kind of friendly Festive Triffid.
It’s not a tiny tree either. It almost completely blocks the pavement and you practically have to step into the road to get round it. And it’s been there for over two weeks. Yes, eventually it will rot away, or be made into nests by voles and other small creatures, but I’m not sure I should be made to wait that long. The stupidest thing is that it presumably also inconveniences the people who put it there as it blocks the pavement outside their house(unless someone from a different street crept over to ours in the dead of night and dumped it. Surely more hassle than just disposing of it normally. But possible. It would be typical of those idiots who live in Sistova Road). I’m guessing it belongs to the house which it is directly outside of. And I’m no Miss Marple, but a tell-tale trail of pine needles up their path would suggest I might be right (again I wouldn’t put it past the Sistova Road Cissies – as we call them in my road- to counterfeit this evidence. That’s the kind of sad people they are. All of them.)
Dumping your tree outside your own house is rude and itÂ’s lazy. (Admittedly my fence is still broken, but thatÂ’s only because the bloke I got to come and give me an estimate for it seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth).
But last night on my way home in the cold drizzle, I passed the decaying tree, and the smell of the damp pine needles hit my nostrils. In a remembrance of things past, I was transported back to happy family Christmases. More specifically to when we took the tree down. It was the one time of year that I volunteered to do the Hoovering, so that I could vacuum up the carpet of brown pine needles from behind where the tree had stood. IÂ’d love to hear them crackle as they were sucked through the rollers and into the Hoover bag. IÂ’d forgotten about that, but thanks to the wonder of olfactory memory, it all came back in an instant and made me smile.
But I donÂ’t believe that the people who dumped the tree did it to spread such fleeting happiness. ItÂ’ll be interesting to see how long the tree stays there. If it last till next Christmas I might nick it and put it up in my house. It would frighten off burglars.
